Best SaaS Content Tools

More than 80 percent of marketers use content marketing, and 70 percent of marketers allocate a big part of their budgets to this marketing strategy. But why is this the case?

Content marketing is widespread because it’s effective. SaaS companies can show their names and tools to customers who have never seen them by putting out informative articles, attractive social media posts, and exciting videos. Putting out content is the only way to be visible on the web, where thousands of sales are made daily. This visibility brings in traffic, opens the door to new sales deals, and builds trust.

However, just like any other marketing strategy, a good content marketing strategy requires good planning and analytics, and it requires the right marketing tools that can help you with all of these requirements. Below is a list of tools you should know about if you’re using content marketing.

Social

Buffer

About Buffer

Launched in 2010, Buffer is a social media management platform that helps users analyze and publish social media content, engage the right audiences, and track progress. The tools that Buffer offers include a Publishing tool that can be used while planning and scheduling content, an Analytics tool that reports performances of different social media posts, an Engagement tool that lets businesses engage with their audience, and a Start Page tool that enables you to create personalized landing pages for social media.

Three of these multipurpose tools are explained in detail below.

1. Buffer’s Publishing Tool

Buffer provides an excellent alternative to Facebook’s Content Creator. To build their brands on various platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, and even TikTok, marketing teams can plan, schedule, and set reminders for their content using Buffer. The most practical side is that you can manage these different platforms and content from a single dashboard.

It’s also possible to collaborate with your team: users can draft posts, get approvals and reviews and share content on this common platform.

2. Buffer’s Analytics Tool

Just like SaaS marketing metrics, there are key metrics that you have to measure for your social media content. Buffer’s Analytics tool provides insights into the most critical performance metrics, compares paid and organic results of posts you had boosted, and tells you whether you’re reaching your target audience. It’s possible to create customized reports that summarize these insights as well.

3. Buffer’s Engagement Tool

Social media offers excellent opportunities to converse with your customers. Buffer makes these conversations easier by letting its users navigate through unanswered comments and segment comments into categories like feedback, questions about purchases, and remarks on pricing. This tool also highlights urgent conversations so that you can prioritize.

Buffer’s Pricing

Buffer offers four different plans, one of them being free. The paid plans are called Essentials, Team and Agency, and the prices range from $5/month to $100/month.

Buzzsumo

About Buzzsumo

A more expensive alternative to Buffer, Buzzsumo is another content marketing platform founded in 2013. Buzzsumo is one of the most extensive indexes of social engagement data, with eight billion articles and more than three hundred trillion engagements indexed each day. This immense database provides users with quality data, analysis, and reports.

Buzzsumo can be used to come up with new content ideas for social media, plan and put out said content, track performance, and find influencers in your industry. Below are the three most valuable components of Buzzsumo:

1. Buzzsumo’s Content Discovery Tool

It’s tiring to come up with new stuff to post on social every day. It’s even harder to keep up with the constantly changing trends on TikTok and Instagram. Buzzsumo’s Discovery tool can show you data about the most recent trends and viral topics so that you don’t have to keep following in big accounts’ footsteps. This tool also has an SEO insights feature to analyze trending keywords on social platforms, just like you would on search engines.

Buzzsumo also gives users distribution tips to know where and when to publish their content for the maximum number of impressions.

2. Buzzsumo’s Influencer Discovery Tool

Influencer marketing is one of the most effective ways of building brand awareness. However, it may be challenging to find influencers that appeal to the same audience as you do. Buzzsumo’s Influencer tool detects the influencers with the most shared content and those that have addressed the topics related to your industry. Users can also see the influencers who amplify your and your competitors’ content. These names can give you an idea about the next person who may advocate for your brand.

3. Buzzumo’s Content Research Tool

Buzzsumo’s Content Research Tool shows users the type and subject of data that resonates the most with your target audience. Additionally, Buzzsumo lets you perform backlink analysis that shows the websites linking to your competitors’ domains. This analysis is constantly updated, and the instant alerts function of Buzzsumo notifies you whenever there’s a new link.

Buzzsumo’s Pricing

Buzzsumo also offers a free plan with limited access. The other three plans, Pro, Plus, and Large, have prices ranging from $99/month to $299/month.

Designing

PlaceIt

If you’re looking for a platform where you can create all your branding designs, Placeit is a great tool! With more than 50K templates and a growing library of designs made by professionals each day, you can create eye-catching images. Make everything from logos and videos to your social campaign with branded images in minutes.

Just select your favorite video template, customize your text, change the color of backgrounds and shapes, and add your images or video clips. 

All their videos are made by a professional team, so you can rely on them being eye-catching templates for your campaigns. Once you have customized your template, simply click the download button. 

Key features:

• Unlimited downloads. Keep creating, you get to have the unlimited downloads you need for your brand.
• Fonts and audio selection. You can also customize the playback speed and quantity of slides to make a short or long video.
• New templates every day. Designers are always in the loop for trends and they create beautiful assets every day.
• Easy-to-use. You can create tons of designs, arts, videos, demos, Instagram stories, and social media marketing assets with no technical skills.
• Professional graphics. All graphics are made by a professional team, so you can rely on them being eye-catching templates for your campaigns.

Pros of Placeit:

• Wide range of graphic libraries, +85,000 exclusive design, music and photo assets.
• You can choose between tons of video formats for your marketing arsenal.
• Constant updates of the graphics and the tools
• Free tools available for everyone
• High-resolution graphics

Pricing:

Basic: Free

Unlimited: starting from $7.47 per user/month

Analytics

HockeyStack

Owing to the dynamic nature of the industry and high data volumes, accurate analytics is critical for SaaS companies. With its no-code interface, automatic tracking capabilities, and powerful integrations, Hockeystack is a SaaS analytics and attribution platform that rises up to the challenge perfectly.

Designed to simplify analysis and attribution, HockeyStack allows users to monitor and visualize a variety of metrics pertaining to sales, revenue, product, and marketing with just a 5 minute setup. This means that you’ll be able to figure out which blog posts resonate most with your audience, identify top referrers, and understand how your content contributes to revenue — all without typing long blocks of code.

With HockeyStack, you can answer important questions that can drive your content marketing efforts such as:

“Which blog posts drive the most MRR?”

“Which ad campaigns bring the most engaged customers with the highest NPS scores?,” or

“Which whitepapers bring you the most closed-won deals?”

HockeyStack also comes complete with a survey tool that can be used to understand how satisfied customers are with your product and how likely they are to refer your company to their peers.

Here’s what else you can do with HockeyStack:

• Dive deeper into the user journey and get insight into everything from ad clicks to demo signups
• Create funnels to identify how likely your users are to get activated, convert, and expand
• Understand which touchpoints are most lucrative for you based on your attribution model of choice

HockeyStack Pricing

HockeyStack has two pricing plans, both of which come with a free 14 day trial.

You can check out the pricing page here.

HockeyStack Integrations

• Paddle
• Stripe
• Hubspot
• Crisp Chat
• Mailchimp
• Intercom
• Pipedrive
• Chameleon
• Salesforce
• Zapier (coming soon)

HockeyStack Summary

HockeyStack’s ability to create dashboards, funnels, goals, and surveys without typing any code makes it remarkably easy to track the progress of your content marketing efforts. With its large pool of integrations, Hockeystack can also be used to break data silos and promote cross-functional collaboration, ensuring that you get the results you’re looking for from your content.

Surfer

About Surfer

Surfer is a content intelligence and analytics tool that helps businesses improve their content’s ranking on search engines. Founded back in 2017, Surfer helps users optimize their content based on their SEO strategy. Surfer doesn’t only make suggestions for existing content but also enables users to create a brand new content marketing strategy, write outlines, and audit their unique content. The tool integrates with other popular and versatile software such as Google Docs, Jasper.ai, and WordPress.

Thanks to the three features of Surfer, which are explained below, and its use cases, Surfer is used by people in various SaaS positions, ranging from content specialists to content marketers.

1. Surfer’s Content Planner

While making plans for the upcoming months, content marketers and specialists can get ideas by simply entering a keyword. By entering a broad keyword, content creators can receive thousands of subject/title suggestions that relate to the keyword. This means less time spent thinking about the following topic to be written about in the days to come, a problem that worries all SaaS marketers involved in content marketing.

But you don’t need to find the keyword yourself; Surfer can also help you discover keywords with high potential with its planner. Not only that, but it can also tell users the intent of people that search for a specific keyword. This enables users to create content with the audience’s needs in mind.

2. Surfer’s Content Editor

It’s hard to optimize your content to improve its visibility on search engines. However, Surfer’s AI technology makes this process easier by giving its users guidelines to get them in front of their competitors’ content. This editor’s content score doesn’t only base its suggestions and score on keyword density. It compares your content with competing pages by looking at various aspects, increasing your chances of rising ranks. The editor also makes content suggestions that will enable you to rank for multiple keywords with one content piece.

The editor can be integrated with the content planner. Thus, you can develop ideas, write their outlines, and optimize the finalized piece all with one tool.

3. Surfer’s Audit

Even after editing all your content, you may need to perform SEO audits. While many SEO specialists do audits manually, checking for aspects like page speed, content length, backlinks, and so on one after the other, Surfer users can automate most tasks involved in SEO audits. Along with the Content Planner and Editor, this feature helps SEO specialists optimize content in less time.

Surfer’s Pricing

Surfer offers three paid plans: basic, pro, and business. The cheapest plan starts from $49/month.

If you’re interested in learning more about SurferSEO, here’s an official review that you can look into.

Ahrefs

About Ahrefs

A software founded in 2010, Ahrefs is another versatile SEO product that helps marketers publish better content. Used by well-known companies like Netflix and Linkedin, Ahrefs is one of the most widely used SEO toolsets today. Ahrefs isn’t a single tool but rather a toolset: some of these tools include its Site and Keyword Explorers, Rank Tracker, and SEO Dashboard. Customers especially enjoy using Ahrefs due to the amount of data it stores. According to g2, the Ahrefs database stores more than eleven billion keywords and four hundred billion indexed pages.

Ahrefs offer six main tools, and the three most important ones are explained below.

1. Ahrefs’ Projects Dashboard

Marketers tend to have multiple projects running at the same time. After a certain point, it becomes impossible to track the performance of each project manually. Ahrefs’ Projects Dashboard gives users a comprehensive view of their projects’ performances. You can add an unlimited number of projects to Ahrefs’ Dashboard and track their Domain Rating, Health Score, Backlinks, Traffic, etc. It’s also easy to compare projects’ performances because you can view SEO metrics for countless projects on the same page.

Users can connect their Google Search Console and see their data on this dashboard, so you don’t need to spend hours carrying data from one source to the other. Lastly, suppose you can’t check your dashboard as often as possible. In that case, you can set email notifications specific to each project so that you’re constantly updated on your projects’ performances.

2. Ahrefs’ Site Explorer

Competitor Analysis is an essential and complex part of SEO. Ahrefs’ Site Explorer combines multiple reports on a single interface to make analysis easier. You can view the pages that bring the most organic traffic to your competitors, check their backlinks, and understand their paid advertisement strategy by analyzing their paid traffic data. This is where the extensive database of Ahrefs becomes useful. Since Ahrefs monitors more than 150 million keywords in the US alone, you can get an accurate depiction of competitors’ keyword rankings.

There’s no limit to the sites you can analyze. Ahrefs’ Site Explorer lets you explore the backlink profile, search traffic, PPC keywords, and more of any website you want.

3. Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker

The Rank Tracker tool is helpful for your site’s and your competitor’s analysis. By monitoring your rankings for keywords and comparing your performance to that of your competitors, you can easily find the content that needs to be improved or the keywords that need to be targeted more. However, Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker isn’t only about keywords rankings: you can also see if your sites rank in SERP features like image packs, shopping results, “people also ask”s, etc. This way, you can increase your visibility on the web by taking advantage of the different types of search results.

Ahrefs’ Pricing

Ahrefs offers four different pricing plans called Lite, Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise. The pricing range starts from $99 and goes up to $999.

Publishing

Wordable

About Wordable

Often, content managers use Google Docs to write down their posts and ideas and deal with the complications of transferring their content to WordPress. However, the format of the doc rarely stays the same during this process, and editing the new piece requires time and effort. Founded in 2016, Wordable is an app that aims to solve this issue. The app lets you import, format, and export your pieces without losing your layout.

Thus, the two main features of Wordable are:

1. Wordable’s Import Feature

Content Management Systems such as WordPress, HubSpot, and Medium usually aren’t the best places to create content. It’s not as easy to make comments, revisions, and formatting on these platforms as on Google Docs. Wordable lets you do the creating on docs and takes on the code cleaning part of transferring content. When you transfer your articles from docs to WordPress without Wordable, you have to make sure that all of the links open in a new tab. Wordable does all of this manual work for you with its import feature.

2. Wordable’s Integrations

Wordable works with WordPress, Medium, and HubSpot. You can select your finalized article/s on Google Docs and export them to any of these platforms. While doing bulk exports, you don’t have to worry about the different formats you want for each piece. It’s possible to have a uniform or individual formatting for pieces, and the easy-to-understand UI means that this formatting is possible for every user.

Wordable’s Pricing

Wordable offers six different pricing plans, all of which include free trials. The range of the prices can be seen below:

Conclusion

You need to go through many checklists if you’re doing content manually. Content marketing involves planning, creating, publishing, editing, and analyzing content, all of which require teams and tools. Using the tools that fit your budget and needs will get you one step closer to ranking better on search engines, getting more followers on social, and becoming a more prominent brand in the eyes of prospective customers.

FAQ